With advances in technology, more and more content is stored today on removable storage devices. Consumers produce digital contents such as still photos, video movies, voice recordings and personal documents; organizations produce digital files containing designs, software, literature, marketing materials, legal documents, correspondence documentation, databases etc. Content providers distribute movies, music, audio books, digital books, reference material, software, fonts, clips art and the like on digital media. A vast variety of digital content is available via the Internet or cellular networks to be downloaded onto CDs and DVDs.
Removable storage devices are not limited to digital technologies. Many still own collections of vinyl records, audio cassettes and VHS tapes, and such removable storage devices are still used by both users and commercial providers.
A user interested in executing an action with respect to a specific content piece on a content appliance, such as a computer, a CD burner or a printer, must either engage the respective storage device with the content appliance and manually enter the appropriate commands, or the user must provide written instructions to another human operator for executing the action. For example, a user who wishes to burn the content of a memory card on a CD using a CD burner, needs to insert the card into a card reader, a CD into the CD burner and operate the respective personal computer to initiate the burning operation. The burning operation will not be applied if the user does not specifically operate the CD burner as such.
With time, a content collection of an individual user can number hundreds of volumes, and collections of an organization or a professional (for example, a photographer) can exceed thousands of volumes. Thus, to execute action regarding a content piece, the user must first spend a non-negligible amount of time searching for the specific content piece to find the related volume for every action separately, and then manually execute the desired action with respect to each content piece.
Eastman Kodak Company of Rochester, N.Y. marketed a KODAK DC290 Zoom Digital Camera™, which allows users to assign printing instructions to pictures stored in a memory card when cataloging their content collections. The printing instructions are saved in the memory card with the marked pictures.
Although the Kodak camera enables a user to store printing instructions for pictures, the instructions must be stored in the same storage device in which the associated pictures reside. The user does not have the option of storing the printing instructions and the associated pictures in separate storage devices. Furthermore, the user does not have the option of storing other processing instructions (and not only printing instructions) for applying other content manipulation. Such options missing from the prior art are a constraint on use. Furthermore, such instruction options are unavailable for other storage media, such as CDs that already include digital content and cannot be have additional data stored thereon.
Thus, it would be useful for a user to be able to store processing instructions including but not limited to printing instructions in a storage device, which is separate from the storage device on which the associated content pieces resides.